Addresses:

Career

Worked as a warehouse painter and busboy in Dublin, Ireland, and
performed with a country line–dance group; appeared in the
television series
Pie in the Sky,
1994; cast in the British Broadcasting Corporation television comedy
Ballykissangel;
appeared onstage in the play
A Little World of Our Own,
Donmar Warehouse, 1998. Film appearances include:
Drinking Crude,
1997;
Ordinary Decent Criminal,
2000;
Tigerland,
2000;
American Outlaws,
2001;
Hart's War,
2002;
Minority Report,
2002,
Phone Booth,
2003;
Veronica Guerin,
2003;
S.W.A.T.,
2003;
Intermission,
2003;
Alexander,
2004.

Sidelights

Irish actor Colin Farrell emerged in 2002 as Hollywood's
most–sought–after new leading man with roles in Steven
Spielberg's
Minority Report
and a string of other major feature films released over the next year.
Farrell had little trouble submerging a thick Irish brogue to play
American characters, such

Colin Farrell

as a maverick L.A.P.D. cop in
S.W.A.T.
and a sleazy, philandering publicist in
Phone Booth,
both released in 2003.
Entertainment Weekly
critic Lisa Schwarzbaum asserted that Hollywood typecasting standards
requiring a certain "taciturn iconoclasm suits Farrell's
scruffy handsomeness, and the Irish actor seems more at ease than ever
portraying rule–breaking American men." Part of
Farrell's appeal seemed linked with reports of his penchant for
drinking, brawling, and randy public behavior. He admitted to
Esquire
writer Chris Jones that his infamous, hard–drinking,
bad–boy image and fast–moving career were inextricably
linked. "I'm chasing something I'll never catch
with this job," he said. "I'm chasing a feeling of
peace that I don't think I'll ever experience."

Born on March 31, 1976, in Dublin, Ireland, Farrell was the last of four
children in his family. His father, Eamon, had been a professional
soccer player in Ireland in the 1960s, and his parents' marital
union eventually dissolved. Farrell and his siblings lived with their
mother in Castleknock, an area of newer homes just outside Dublin, near
one of the world's largest parks. But Farrell remembered
Castleknock more for its suburban pall, as he said in a
Vanity Fair
interview with Ned Zeman, and likened
it to Los Angeles. "People here are suspect," Farrell
told Zeman. "Everyone has a hidden agenda. They live in a bubble,
and it's a very nice bubble to live in."

Farrell attended Castleknock College, but eschewed higher educational
pursuits for a series of menial jobs. He worked as a warehouse painter,
and as a busboy at a Dublin pub called the Elephant & Castle.
When a country line–dancing fad swept through Ireland briefly, he
joined a touring company and traveled in a van with other teens
demonstrating the dances. "I did it until I couldn't look
at myself," Farrell recalled in the
Vanity Fair
interview. "I looked at myself in the mirror and I had a
Stetson, and I looked like what the Village People's idea of what
a cowboy is, and I was like, 'I can't do this
anymore.'"

By his own account, Farrell was a discontented young adult, drinking
himself into further despondency. His brother, Eamon, who would become a
director of a Dublin performing–arts academy for youth, talked
him into taking an acting class, and he went on to classes at the Gaiety
School of Drama in the city. He landed a television commercial for his
first job, and then a part in a comedy series called
Pie in the Sky
in 1994. He was soon cast in recurring role in a British Broadcasting
Corporation television series,
Ballykissangel,
about an English priest transferred to a small Irish village. His
feature film debut came in a 1997 Irish movie,
Drinking Crude.

Farrell moved to London, England, to further his career, and in 1998 was
appearing onstage in the play
A Little World of Our Own
at the über–hip Donmar Warehouse theater. American actor
Kevin Spacey saw the play one night, and was impressed with
Farrell's performance. Spacey cast Farrell in his
Dublin–set gangster flick,
Ordinary Decent Criminal,
and made the necessary calls back in Hollywood. Farrell soon arrived in
Los Angeles, California, taking a room at the Holiday Inn in Santa
Monica, and with Spacey's introduction went for a meeting at the
talent–firm powerhouse, Creative Artists Agency (CAA).
Farrell's first meeting there involved some 25 CAA associates
assembled to greet him in a conference room. "I rabbited on for
15 minutes," Farrell
Vanity Fair
's Zeman. "It was scary.… I mean, I was 22. I
didn't even know what this was about."

Not one to turn down an invitation, Farrell was soon a fixture at
Hollywood A–list parties, and his brazen attitude was not the
type of networking that was common to the industry. Determined
nevertheless, Farrell learned of auditions to be held in London by
Lost Boys
/
Batman Forever
director Joel Schumacher for a small–budget Vietnam–era
story,
Tigerland.
Without having read the script, Farrell talked his way into an
audition, and Schumacher sent him away with orders to make an audition
tape. Farrell did so with his sister's help—the tape is
included on
Tigerland
's DVD release—and won one of the leads. The 2000 release
was not a box–office hit, but earned critical accolades for its
gritty look at a United States Army boot camp in 1971 Louisiana.
Farrell's character, the Texan rebel of the group, helps some of
his fellow grunts avoid being shipped off to the war overseas. To
deliver a convincing Texas accent, Farrell submerged his thick Irish
brogue by spending a few weeks in Texas and carousing at
honky–tonk bars there.

By the spring of 2001, there was a serious press buzz about Farrell. In
May,
Time International
's Jumana Farouky called him "The Man Who Stole The
Movies," noting that the relatively unheard–of actor was
earning $2 million per picture. "Farrell won't be unknown
for long," Farouky predicted, and asserted that in
Tigerland,
"Farrell displays a kind of cool that's rare in
today's leading men. A sensitive brooder with rugged good looks,
he's Russell Crowe without the ego." Farouky explained
that Farrell's arrival in Hollywood as worries about a potential
Screen Actors' Guild strike intensified gave his career an
unexpected boon: fears about a walkout made some of the top names
choosier about their next parts, and thus other roles were up for grabs
for newcomers.

Farrell's next choice of a role did not bode well for his future,
but it would be one of the few missteps of his career. He starred as
nineteenth–century rebel Jesse James in
American Outlaws,
and the film bombed at the box office in August of 2001. Critical
assessments were scathing, but Farrell had better luck with his next
part, which came thanks to the fears about a strike: Edward Norton bowed
out of a role in
Hart's War,
and Farrell was offered it instead. The World War II–era drama
was set in a German–run prisoner–of–war camp, and
featured him alongside veteran leading man Bruce Willis. Again, the film
failed to lure audiences in any great number, but critics liked it and
wrote favorably of Farrell's performance.

Farrell was stunned to land a role in
Minority Report,
director Steven Spielberg's summer of 2002 blockbuster. Again,
he won the role after Matt Damon dropped out, and did not have to submit
an audition tape, either; in this case, he dropped by
Spielberg's office on the set of another movie, shared a sardine
sandwich with him, and was offered the role opposite Tom Cruise that
same day. Spielberg's picture was based on a story by
cult–favorite sci–fi writer Philip K. Dick, and described
as "a thriller confident and complex enough to mix mayhem with
meditations on predestination and free will" by
Newsweek
's film reviewer, David Ansen.
Minority Report
is set in Washington, D.C. in 2054, where Cruise's character is
a "pre–crime" detective. Law–enforcement
authorities now have the power to stop crime before it happens, thanks
to a trio of psychic "Pre–Cogs" submerged in a
top–secret tank, but Farrell's Justice Department agent
arrives to keep an eye on Cruise's zealous detective. The plot
takes a sinister and high–speed turn when Cruise's upright
character shows up on one of the pre–cog screens. Though
Farrell's role was a somewhat thankless one as merely a foil to
the star, the movie was a huge box–office draw, and helped make
the Irish actor a household name.

By early 2003 Farrell's asking price had climbed to $5 million
per picture, and the caliber of roles offered him continued to escalate
as well. He starred next in
The Recruit,
opposite Al Pacino, as a whiz–kid from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology recruited by Pacino's Central
Intelligence Agency veteran. The film opened as the No. 1
box–office draw its first weekend, but his next film, the
comic–book adaptation
Daredevil
with Ben Affleck, fared less well. Farrell sported a shaved head and a
bulls–eye target on his forehead, the latter an eerie harbinger
for his next role.

In
Phone Booth,
Farrell played a man trapped a phone booth by a sniper's
cross–hatch. It was also the first film in which he received top
billing, and was expected to carry with a minimum of special effects.
Farrell was cast by
Tigerland
director Schumacher as New York media publicist Stu Shepard, a man of
dubious moral character with a penchant for expensive suits and waifish,
up–and–coming actresses. Hoping to romance one of these
clients, Stu calls her daily from a pay phone so that his wife will not
see the calls on his cell phone. She spurns him, but then the phone
rings, and Stu answers it. In short order, the man on the other end
reveals far too many unsavory details about Stu's life for the
call to be a prank, and tells him to reform. The caller also trains a
gun on him, and Farrell's character is then pinned inside the
booth as prostitutes, the police, the media, and finally his wife clamor
for him to come out. The part, with just one location to keep the
viewer's interest, was a challenging one for any actor, and
critics asserted that Farrell handled it masterfully. "Slippery
and defensive, with panicky eyes and a touch of beard accenting his
chin, Farrell jabbers and implodes.…" declared
Entertainment Weekly
's Owen Gleiberman. "He has the intensity to play two
conflicting states at once—cockiness and anxiety—and the
flow of the movie is in watching the former give way to the
latter."

In all, Farrell appeared in six movies released in 2003, including
S.W.A.T.,
a genre action–thriller featuring yet another example of
Hollywood's penchant for formulaic action movies with a Los
Angeles Police Department plotline, and
Veronica Guerin,
Schumacher's tale of a slain Irish journalist. He had a
supporting part in
Intermission,
filmed in Dublin, carrying one of eleven linked subplots related to the
break–up of a couple, and was also to appear in
The Home at the End of the World,
an adaptation of a novel by Michael Cunningham. Oliver Stone cast
Farrell in the title role in
Alexander,
a sweeping, big–budget epic about the Macedonian king who
conquered large parts of the known world in the fourth century B.C.

With a price now reportedly in the $8 million range, Farrell seems
relatively unaffected by his stardom. Profanity–laced interviews
are still the norm, and his reputation for carousing remains: in the
summer of 2003 he reportedly spent $20,000 at a New York City strip club
in a single evening. His entourage, however, often includes family
members such as his brother, Eamon, and sister, Catherine, an actress.
Another sister, Claudine, serves as his assistant. Farrell has been
romantically linked with a number of actresses and celebrities, and was
even wed briefly to Amelia Warner for four months in 2001. Model Kim
Bordenave, 33, gave birth to Farrell's first child in September
of 2003, but the pair were never a couple. He bought a Los Angeles home
for her and the child, and keeps one of his own back in Ireland, in the
Dublin section of Irishtown near the city's Grand Canal.
"I'm fairly low–maintenance," the actor, who
obtained the first credit card of his life in 2002, told
Vanity Fair
's Zeman. "Packets of smokes and a few pints and
I'm a happy man. I have all this [money] that I never thought
I'd have. And I wouldn't know what to do with it, apart
from just let it sit there. People will think it's from me being
smart, but it's from me not knowing what to do with it. They pay
me this money for a job that I would gladly do for minimum wage, and
it's insane."